Training bees to perform simple addition and subtraction

Going back just a few decades, scientists believed “it was just humans and maybe a few primates that might have the capacity to process numbers in a more complex way,” said Adrian Dyer, a vision scientist from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, who was the senior author of the study and Howard’s Ph.D. adviser on the project. There’s also a possibility that the bees were learning something other than math, said Felicity Muth, an animal cognition researcher who works at the University of Nevada and was not involved in this study. “One thing I take from the bees,” Dyer said, “[is] once you see that this very small animal with a brain less than a million neurons can learn a very complex task… wow, what can [humans] achieve?”

Source: www.pbs.org